Eugene Foster: 1927 - 2008

Dr. Eugene Foster, the retired pathologist who orchestrated the DNA testing that showed that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of the slave Sally Hemings' children, died Monday at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, according to his son-in-law Brian Pusser. He was 81.

Historians had speculated for nearly two centuries that Jefferson's affair with the household slave had produced illegitimate offspring because of rumors at the time and because the children strongly resembled the nation's third president.

But most experts had dismissed the speculation.

Dr. Foster was brought into the controversy by a friend, amateur historian Winifred Bennett. At a 1996 dinner with Dr. Foster, she speculated about the possibility of using DNA to trace the possible linkage.

"I reached the conclusion that theoretically it may be almost impossible using the conventional technology that was being used for tracing ancestry," he said later. When Bennett announced to the media that they would try to trace the ancestry, "All the experts said it was a crazy idea, and I was somewhat embarrassed," he said.

One of those experts, however, told Dr. Foster about a then-new technique that used only the Y, or male, chromosome to trace ancestry. Unlike other chromosomes, the Y does not undergo recombination during reproduction and is thus passed from father to son intact.

Dr. Foster contacted geneticist Christopher Tyler-Smith of the University of Oxford in England, who agreed to perform the necessary tests.

Dr. Foster and Bennett tracked down four male lineages to test: Jefferson's lineage, descended from his paternal grandfather because Jefferson himself had no acknowledged male heirs; the lineages of Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally Hemings' eldest and youngest sons; and that of the Carrs, two of Jefferson's sister's sons who were widely thought to have fathered Hemings' children.

Their conclusion: The Y chromosome of a descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson matched that of Jefferson's lineage perfectly, that of Woodson's descendants did not, and none of them matched the Carrs'.

Ultimately, the findings were published in 1998 in the journal Nature.

Dr. Foster spent 17 years in the pathology department at the University of Virginia and 14 more at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston before retiring in Charlottesville.